Josep directed by the award-winning cartoonist Aurel (aka Aurélien Froment) is important for more than one (good) reason.
First and foremost, it´s the testimony about the less-known Catalan artist Josep Bartoli. The movie is focused on his escape from France to Mexico - where he will be the lover of another rebel, Frida Kahlo - and afterwards to America, where he will be an acquintance of many famous name of the time, among which Rothko, Charles Pollock or De Kooning, as told on his deathbed by one of his saviors, a French gendarme which at the time was part of the repression system of the Vichy regime. The stories of Spanish refugees from the civil war into France during the war is rarely told and this movie is doing it in a Goya-style of artistic depictions. The animation is done in the vein of Aurel´s cartoons published regularly in Le Monde or Le Monde Diplomatique, among others. The messages are mostly left-wing, completely in the vein of the character.
Another interesting reason for watching this movie was the purely humanist message which overpasses the typical divisions shaped by war. Particularly the civil war has the potential of destroying deeply and sometimes irreparably the human trust. In Josep, the unique human contribution can save a life. It is a good reminder for those depicting the world in a simplistic black-and-white brush.
This movie was an outstanding intellectual encounter revealing how limited is my knowledge about the Spanish Civil War and its intellectuals actors. It made me think that each couple of years, the intellectual history of various parts of the world is going through tremendous challenges and tragedies - the Pinochet dictatorship, Rwanda genocide, Armenian genocide, the Iranian Islamic Revolution, Balkan wars and so so many more - that may leave a deep trauma while forcing the intellectual investigation into unknown creative areas. An interesting observation can´t wait to futher explore.
Rating: 4 stars
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